The more I read these books, the more involved I become. I love Thrush Green and all its inhabitants! ( )

Affairs at Thrush Green by Miss Read (Dora Saint) is another gentle, nostalgic read about a small village in the Cotswolds of England where time seems to stand still. This book covers just about a year in the life of the village, starting with a snowy February and ending on the following Christmas. All the regular characters are back and there are a couple of new additions to the neighbourhood.

There is an honesty and joy to this author’s writings whether she is describing the day-to-day life of the residents or the changing seasons and the rural delights to be found in the countryside. Relaxing, a little predictable and with just the right amount of sweetness, these books are perfect comfort reads. ( )

A wonderful British cosey cottage series that centers around the quiet small village and the new vicar adjusting to the quirky parish members. ( )

I remember shelving the Miss Read books when I was a student page at the public library. I never read them, but it seemed to me that they were benign enough to be shelved with the young adult/juvenile fiction, or perhaps in the inspirational aisle. Now that I've finally tried one, I'm surprised how accurate that cover-judging was.

I listened to Affairs at Thrush Green on audiobook, read by Gwen Watford. The reading was delightful but the recording awful; the volume level kept changing abruptly, even in the middle of tracks, and I had to turn my stereo up to its highest setting to hear the low parts. Then of course I could also hear the accompanying hissing of the track. And then the volume would suddenly spike, blasting both me and the car next to me if I happened to be sitting at a light!

The story itself was hardly a story; more like a string of quite little episodes in the lives of the inhabitants of a small English village. I was struck by how many characters Miss Read introduces — and how hard they were to keep straight. After awhile I managed to remember who most of them were, but then I was left wondering why I should care very much about what happened to them.

Everything is so tame in Thrush Green and Lulling. The worst thing that the people have to face is a surly parishioner who has a tiff with the rector over the Lady Chapel kneelers. Oh, and there is a runaway wife comes home to her grumpy husband. With a few very mild exceptions, everyone is happy and settled and peaceful. Everything is very placid and slow-moving and... well... boring.

I guess after witnessing real suffering, I found the things that distress the inhabitants of Thrush Green very trivial, and the characters weak because they are so easily bothered by problems that are honestly rather inconsequential. The rector, Charles Henstock, is so depressed by his argument with Mrs. Thurgood that he is in low spirits for months. How very fragile, for a man of the cloth! I wanted to tell him (nicely, of course) to get over it.

And I got tired of how compliant everyone was and how things just happened to work out to everyone's satisfaction. There are a few exceptions: one of the two distressed marriages is not resolved at the end, and a spinster resigns herself to the death of her last maidenly hope. There is some poignancy there. It's not that I enjoy unhappy endings — it's just I grew tired of the constant polite conversations, the neat little situations where everyone means well and is so easy and comfortable.

I did enjoy the humorous asides in the narrative voice, clever little comments that reminded me of a declawed Jane Austen. But they were far and few between, not frequent enough to give the story spice. I also enjoyed the descriptions of nature and the lines of poetry that the rector quotes to himself. Some of it was quite nice.

I suppose the Thrush Green books would be a restful escape for many readers, who would enjoy Miss Read's small, safe world and uniformly good-hearted people. But I'd rather go to Avonlea or somewhere similar, where the good-hearted people are spiced with the mean, the selfish, and the ridiculous. Montgomery's characters are so much more vivid and alive than Miss Read's. And Affairs at Thrush Green did drag on as an audiobook; I wished it were over by the third disc (and there were six). I'm glad I sampled Miss Read's work, but one taste is enough, I think. ( )